What BoatTEST Members Do On Their Boats

Last week we sent out a simple questionnaire to 55,000 of our BoatTEST members who had opened one or more of our daily newsletters in the last 30 days. The object was to find what sort of content we should be delivering. Perhaps the most important question was simply, “How do you use your boat?” We think you might be astonished at the answers. 

Here’s what we discovered:

• 83% of you use your boats for day cruising and entertaining. That is the touchstone for most of our readers — the primary thing is taking friends and family out for the day. It is because of this statistic that boat builders are in a mad scramble to build up-scale crossover boats.
• 42% of you still use your boats for weekending and overnighting. This is a remarkably high percentage and it caught us by surprise. The reason is that BoatTEST’s readers are bucking the national trend to strictly go day boating. While 83% go day boating, almost half that number still use their boats for at least an overnight weekend experience. 

• 25% to 30% of BoatTEST members go long-range cruising, either for a summer vacation or more extended adventure travel.  That is little wonder because 36% of our visiting members in the last 30 days own trawlers/LRCs, express cruisers, flybridge cruisers and motoryachts.   
• 36% of BoatTEST’s visitors over the last 30 days rank saltwater fishing as one of their primary uses of their boat — ranked #3 in boating activity.  This is not surprising as center console boats are the most numerous among BoatTEST readers, along with express fishboats and bay/flats boats, walkarounds.
• 19% go freshwater fishing, which makes for a total of 55% of BoatTEST members visiting the last 30 days go fishing from their boats.